Tag Archives: Waiting Tables

I’m kind of pressed for time here

Every once in a while I’ll be really out of ideas for stuff to write about. Like right now. But at the same time, I know that I have to write something, otherwise I won’t be able to put something up everyday. People always say “quality over quantity,” but I disagree, I think quantity is clearly superior to quality. How else can our most popular TV shows make it all the way to seasons nine and ten without eventually just forgetting about quality and focusing strictly on the quantity?

But right now, unfortunately, I don’t think I have the luxury of neither quantity nor quality. I’m working a morning shift and for some reason I can never get out of bed early enough to get my writing done during the day. Today was supposed to be different. And it was, but only marginally different, because I only got up slightly earlier and gained like fifteen minutes of time. What am I supposed to do with fifteen minutes? Usually these things take me much longer to write. I’m not at all suggesting that I put a ton of thought into them, but generally I like to at least read the sentences back to myself to make sure everything’s legible.

But not today. I only have fifteen, well I guess now it’s more like ten minutes, to write about something. But I can’t think of anything. It doesn’t really matter, because I’m already three paragraphs deep and I think I’ve sufficiently wasted enough of everyone’s time already. The only thing I have here is me trying to beat the clock, to get a full blog post on the page before I really have to get out the door.

Getting out the door in the morning is the worst. I just switched jobs like two months ago. It’s the same gig, I’m still waiting tables at a restaurant, but whereas at my old job I could show up to work basically any time right down to the second before we opened, here I have to be responsible and show up forty-five minutes before service starts, making a good impression, looking people in the eye and saying stuff like, “You got it boss,” when the manager points to a stack of plates and makes me move it across the restaurant.

And so my morning routine just feels a lot more forced. Like I have to really be out the door at the same minute, which is probably the hardest part of the day, that conscious decision where you say to yourself, OK, my time is over, I’m now willingly giving myself up, walking out the door, to work for somebody else, at your service, you got it boss, how about another Diet Coke sir?

It’s not that bad. I read that back, OK, I didn’t read it back, but only because I don’t have any time, like I said, but I’m imagining reading it back, and it may or may not have sounded a little bitter. I’m not bitter. I don’t mind working in a restaurant. I like moving around. I like grabbing handfuls of food when I think that nobody’s looking and shoving them into my mouth. I’m sure the bosses have caught me, because it started out as just a piece of food here or there, but nobody ever said anything to me, and so I just upped the frequency, to the point where there are hardly any spaces in between bites. My whole shift is just one giant snack.

And then the chefs put out a staff meal before every shift. And I used to approach it with caution. Being the new guy, I didn’t want to just dive in, out of my way, here’s my elbow, I’m getting food. But that only lasted like a week, because I was being so timid with my regular snacking, I’d be famished by the time staff meal dropped at four in the afternoon. Can you imagine, like six hours without a bite to eat? If you’re reading this from a developing country, I’m sorry, that must have sounded completely insensitive. But if you’re reading this from America, am I right or what? Six hours without food? Please.

So now it’s like I’m constantly in and out of the kitchen, I always go in pretending that I’m looking for a stack of plates to move, but what I’m really doing is checking out the chef’s progress with the staff meal. As soon as it hits the window, I want to be the first person to throw an elbow to that other person who thinks he or she is going to be first. The first time I went for it, some other employee was all like, “Hey Rob, you’re supposed to let the night crew eat first.” And so I put down my utensils and waited for the night crew to eat. And then there was nothing left. You think I’m ever going to make that mistake again? Listen, there’s one thing I want in life. Snacks. That’s it.

Well, are you happy with what you just read? I did it. I wrote the whole thing in about twenty minutes. I’m not exactly proud of what I’ve produced, well, scratch that, I am proud, you know why? Quantity. Quantitatively speaking, it’s all there. And really, centuries from now, English will have evolved as a language to the point where anything written today is all meaningless gibberish. You ever try to read Shakespeare? No way that’s English. And so I would argue that quality is all relative. Or something like that. I really have to get to work.

The tale of the haunted coffee machine: A true story

I’m pretty sure I saw a ghost the other day. Well, I don’t know if I saw it exactly, but I definitely felt its presence. I was at work and this guy I work with came up to me and asked me if I hadn’t noticed anything strange lately in the restaurant. “Like what are you talking about?” I asked him. And he said, “You know, like ghosts or anything.” And whenever a ghost conversation comes up, I always get really excited, like the same excitement I used to feel when I read those Goosebumps books as a little kid. Even though Goosebumps, when you think about it, was a pretty lame series, none of the stories were really scary. Spooky, at best, all with really lackluster endings and gaping plot holes. Whatever, they were a bunch of little kids’ books. I remember one time my brother wrote a letter to R.L. Stine, the author of those books, asking him all sorts of questions, like, “How do you write your books so fast?” and not to be outdone by my little brother, I wrote a letter too, with even stupider questions, like, “What do you think would have happened if Spider-Man never got rid of his alien costume?” We both got letters back from R.L. Stine on the same exact day, and both of our letters were identical, photocopied, some bullshit about how he appreciates letters from the fans, and how he reads each one individually, and shares them with his wife and daughter. Even as a little kid I could tell he was lying, just from being in a family myself. Really? He reads every letter? Come on. I imagined my own dad coming home from work with a stack of correspondence and saying to us, “All right, everyone in the living room. It’s time for me to share all of my letters with you.” And besides, Mr. Stine, if you’re spending all of that time sharing our letters, why couldn’t you spend a second or two writing out a custom note? I mean, you are a writer right? And you write those Goosebumps books so fast, fast enough that you have enough free time to bore your wife and daughter by reading all of these out loud, each stupid fan letter you get in the mail every day.

Anyway, this guy at work starts talking about ghosts. And I’m like, shit, I have to come up with something, because I so want this to be a cool ghost conversation. Every time I think a ghost conversation is getting good, it always winds up disappointing, it’s the same feeling you get when you have a really great sneeze coming, and right as you open your mouth and tilt your head back and crunch up your face it just goes away, no sneeze, and you’re like, what the hell, it was right there. I was worried, mostly because I thought that if I didn’t come up with something cool to tell him, he wouldn’t feel at all pressured to tell me something cool in return. So I basically lied, and told him that one time I saw something out of the corner in my eye in the basement. Pretty lame, yeah, but I didn’t have a lot of time to think. “What about you?” I asked him. And he said, “One time I thought I saw something move past me, upstairs, towards the top of the staircase, but it was also out of the corner of me eye.” And I just kind of stared at him for a second before saying, “Oh, OK. Cool.” And that was it. Someone else overheard our conversation and chimed in, uninvited about how, “Well I saw a ghost one time!” but by this point I was already super bored with fake ghost stories and couldn’t bear the thought of being let down by any more disappointing make-believe.

But then later in the day, I was pouring hot water out of the giant coffee machine. There are three nozzles, one for regular, one for decaf, and one for insta-hot hot water. I was using the insta-hot. While I was holding the lever down for the hot water, my hand was directly under the regular coffee nozzle. And while I’m waiting for this teapot to fill up with water, I mean, it takes forever, such a long time. It might as well be called eterna-hot instead of insta-hot because, let’s face it, if you want a cup of hot water, it’s not coming out instantly. There’s some sort of mechanism inside that machine that’s heating up that water, and it’s taking a little while. Sure, maybe it’s a lot faster than boiling a pot of water on the stove. But insta? Like insantly? Hardly.

Well like I was saying, my hand is right under the regular coffee nozzle, and out of nowhere, hot coffee starts pouring out of it right onto my hand. It came out for maybe two seconds, just long enough to give me a nice scalding burn. Also, I got surprised by the shock of the coffee and I spazzed out and threw the half-filled pot of hot water, and guess who was walking by just as the pot flew out of my grip? That’s right, it was that other guy that told me that totally made up ghost story. And he got burned too. He jumped and turned to me and said, “What the hell man?” and I just said, “Sorry! The coffee machine went off by itself and burned me!” And he said, “That’s impossible! You need to pull the lever for coffee to come out!”

And it was true. This is a really old machine with a really big handle that you had to pull. There’s no way that it could have pulled itself. And even if it did pull itself, it would have stayed in the pulled position, not just switched itself back off. Plus, like I said, it’s a big lever, so I would have heard it making a big chnk sound as it switched on. And I would have heard it again when it switched off. But there was nothing. No sounds. And I told all of this to the guy who got burned. And he got it, like he totally got it. And then I got it. And both of our mouths hung open at the same time. And we were just staring at each other, and then we slowly turned, in unison, to the regular coffee nozzle. And we knew it. We said, “G-G-Ghost!” at the same time. It had to be true. We were both making up ghost stories and a real ghost must have overheard us and decided to teach us a lesson. And we both got spooked, big time.

I went home and wrote a letter to R.L. Stine about what had happened. I told him all about the haunted coffee machine. I told him, listen here’s the perfect story that we can use to reboot the Goosebumps franchise. This will put you back on the map! And I told him, if you’re too busy, I can ghost write it for you. Like not ghost like haunted, but like ghost like I’ll write it and it can still say R.L. Stine. Because I’m trying to be a writer, and I feel like I’m a natural storyteller. I didn’t hear anything for a while, but then my mom got a letter at her house from R.L. Stine addressed to me. It was the same exact photocopied note from fifteen years ago, all about how he shared my letter with his wife and daughter. Come on! You’re daughter’s got to be all grown up now! There’s no way she’s still living at home. What did you do, call her up and tell her about my letter? And what, did you share my idea with her? Are you going to steal my story? I’m just letting everyone know that if you ever read a book about a haunted coffee machine, it was all my idea and I was ripped off, because I came up with it first, and it really happened, it wasn’t a story, it’s true! I swear!

Anyone remember that episode of the Twilight Zone where the earth was getting closer to the sun, and everyone was so hot, but then it turned out that the earth was actually getting farther away, and so people got really cold?

It was so hot this summer. I was constantly sweating. Everyone else was sweating too, but I felt like somehow I was getting the brunt of the heat. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I’m taller than everybody else, closer to the sun. Or it could be that I often feel like the world revolves around me, and so my problems are just naturally a little heavier than everyone else’s. But it’s also because I didn’t see anybody sweating nearly as much as I was.

I would get out of the shower and dry off and immediately start sweating again. I’d go meet somebody or go to work and by the time I’d get to wherever I was supposed to be, my shirt would start soaking through with perspiration. Super embarrassing. And it was really uncomfortable. I’d bring a change of clothes to work, because I know I’d have sweated through whatever I wore just getting there. But then I’d start to sweat through my work clothes not even five minutes later. I tried hanging out in the walk in refrigerator. I tried standing in front of the AC, to completely cool down, but I was still just damp, always a little damp, and the dampness wasn’t like a refreshing dampness, like the dew on blades of grass in the morning, it was a damp like I made a tuna sandwich for lunch, but I made it early in the morning, and by noon the sandwich is all damp.

And it’s beside the point, because there is no AC at the restaurant where I work. There’s an AC unit, but I think it’s purely decorative. People would complain to me that’s it was hot. “Can’t you turn on the AC?” they’d ask me. And I’d just be standing over them, literally dripping over them, sweating through my shirt, through this layer of cotton, and it would get profuse, leaking through my shirt, dripping onto them, but still they’d complain about the heat. And I was just so pissed. These people wouldn’t leave me a dime, I could tell, so I didn’t even pretend to act like I was at all interested in how good or bad of a time they’d be having. I’d just stand in front of them, looking at the seconds tick by on my waterproof watch, which I had to buy, because my other watch got destroyed because it wasn’t waterproof. It must have just given up, being tied around my wrist, probably exactly the same as being underwater.

“But can’t you just open the windows?” And I’d be getting angrier by the second because, yes, we should’ve totally open the windows, but my nut job boss is completely blind to reality. She insisted that the AC was working, it was working fine, so she refused to allow the windows to be opened even a crack. She had this nutso logic that open windows would force the AC to work even harder, like it would try not just to cool the room but the entire outside world, which would naturally be much less efficient, which would in turn make the room even hotter, which was, I’m almost positive, physically not possible. We reached the opposite of absolute zero folks, right here in this restaurant. And finally I stopped sweating all together, it became this rare scientific phenomenon where, because it was so hot, the sweat came out of me pre-evaporated, like just a gas, like I was just steaming, and the whole time at work it was this cloud of sweat vapor in this closed room, all of us stuck in this room, nobody enjoying anything, me not enjoying my job, the customers not enjoying their dining experience, the only person enjoying anything would be my boss, she was enjoying the line out the door of mindless sucker tourists, desperate for a piece of this tourist trap restaurant, with its line down the block, down three blocks, everyone sweating, touching everything.

You know what? This is definitely the most disgusting thing I’ve ever written about. I can’t wait until it’s winter so that I can start complaining about how cold I am. Oh man, that’s going to be so great, such a relief. Well, it seems great to me right now, but I’m sure I’m not going to feel the same way when there’s snot constantly running down my face, and I’m drinking cup after cup of hot tea, which won’t do anything to warm me up, but it’ll maybe waste another minute and a half, a minute and a half where I won’t have to concentrate on how cold I am, so I can just be a minute and a half closer to warmer weather, to summer, I can’t wait until it’s hot out again. Wait, now I’m confused. You know, I’m a pretty whiney guy. I’m really hungry too. I think I just need a snack. Maybe a bowl of soup. A nice piping hot bowl of red hot soup. Extra hot. I’ll throw it back in the microwave for another minute or two. I’ll heat up the spoon in the oven, just like you would put a beer mug in the freezer, to get all frosty. Nothing like a first hot bite of soup on an even hotter spoon. If I’m eating something hot, I want it to be hot, like hot, hot. Like super, hot. Like hotter than this summer, just so hot out.

Hello! Waiter! Hello!

I’m not ready to order. Are you my server? Can you find my server? Yes, we’re ready now. Hmm. Hmmmmm. Tell me about your garden salad. You don’t have a garden salad? What kind of a place doesn’t have a garden salad? Yes I’ve looked at the menu. Do you have any sort of a green salad? Yes, I see the salad section. So you have salads? What would be the closest thing to a garden salad? A garden salad, like, you know, vegetables you find in the garden. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. I don’t like cauliflower. Actually, I’m allergic to cauliflower. You know what? Can you just put the cauliflower on the side? On the side is that OK? OK, so I’ll take the garden salad, can you chop that? Like all chopped up. Like just have them chop everything up. Are there mushrooms in that garden salad? I’m actually allergic to mushrooms. Yeah, so just no mushrooms, thanks. Does it come in a bowl? Does it come in a big bowl? Can you put it in a bigger bowl? Just so when I’m mixing it all up. You know what, can I have some more water? Thanks. What kind of dressing do you have? Ranch? Do you have ranch? Who doesn’t have ranch? All right, I’ll take the balsamic. But on the side. Please. And the dijon. Also on the side. OK, so you’ve got that right? The two dressings on the side, OK. Do you have any breadsticks? Does that come with bread?

You know what, I can’t do a salad without ranch, I’ll just have a burger. No bun. Sauteed mushrooms, please. And I want it medium, you know, no pink. And no bun. Does that come with fries? Can I get a salad instead? Do you have like a smaller garden salad that you could give me instead of fries? OK, so no mushrooms in that, right? Can I get an iced tea? It’s unsweetened right? Perfect! Wait, do you have any Splenda or just this Equal and Sweet-and-Low? Oh no, no, no, no, no never mind. I’ll just have a Diet Coke. Diet Pepsi? Fine. Do you have diet Sierra Mist? No? OK, fine, diet Pepsi is fine. Dressing on the side, right? No mayo on the burger. Can I get a little more water, I’m so parched.

OK, kids, what do you want to eat? Kids! Kids put down the Game Boy for a second here so we can order. What do you want to eat? Kids what do you want to eat? What do you have for kids? Do you have a kids’ menu? Do you have chicken fingers? Kids! Kids, do you want chicken fingers? Kids, chicken fingers? Chicken? You want some chicken fingers? You don’t have chicken fingers? Kids, they don’t have chicken fingers. You want a grilled cheese? Sweetie, do you want a grilled cheese? Honey, please, just look here for one second, honey. How do you not have chicken fingers? You have anything like chicken fingers? Breaded chicken breast? Kids, you want breaded chicken breast? It’s like chicken fingers. All right that’s it! Give me the Game Boy! You’ll get it back after you eat! Because you’re not paying attention that’s why! You know what, they’re not going eat that. You have plain pasta? With sauce? OK, two plain pastas with sauce. Put the sauce on the side. And no cheese, no garnishes, no parsley. Can you have them turn down the AC? It’s freezing in here.

Is that table over there empty? Well are they leaving soon? Could we move over there once they pay? Did you give them the check yet? Well, if they leave like before our food comes out, could we move? It looks much roomier, much more comfortable. My kids need a little more space than this. Sit down! Would you please just sit down! Here, take the Game Boy, just sit down! Sorry. You know we’re actually in a rush, so if you could just tell the kitchen to put like a rush on our order, we’re really hungry. The kids are starving. We’re just really hungry. So just a little rush.

You know, I hate to do this to you, but the kids don’t like the pasta. The sauce doesn’t taste right. It just, I don’t know, they said it doesn’t taste right. We’re not going to eat it, so you can just take it off. Just take it off the check. You know, I think they’re OK. They’ll just have some ice cream. Kids, you want ice cream? You want vanilla? You want chocolate? Vanilla? Kids you want whipped cream? Do you want whipped cream? Kids, put down the Game Boy or no ice cream! Kids, you want whipped cream? You want a cherry? Kids you want sprinkles? Sprinkles? Yes? Is that a yes? You know what? Just put some sprinkles on the side, if they want them they’ll use them. You have chocolate or rainbow sprinkles? Just a little of both I guess. But just, can you see if they just could hurry that out? The kids are starving. They’re so hungry. Thanks a lot. The burger? Eh, it’s OK. They probably could’ve seasoned the meat a little better. I think they cooked it too fast. It’s a little dry. No, it’s fine. Well … no, it’s fine. Well … no … well … I’m fine, I’m fine. You have cappuccino? I’ll take a latte. Skim. Decaf. Splenda. No Splenda? Right, I’ll just … I’ll just … I’ll just … I’ll just … I’ll take it. Wait.

Can I get some more coffee? A little more coffee, please?

There’s this diner right down the block from my place. I love it so much. I love diners in general. There’s nothing better than sitting down and being handed a menu as thick as a phonebook with absolutely every single dish in the world printed somewhere inside. I never even look at the menu, because I know that whatever I wind up wanting to order is going to be in there somewhere, and if it isn’t, someone behind the line will just make it for me anyway. Diners are the best because they’ll do anything you want and it’s never a big deal.

I love this diner, but I’m not sure if I like going there for breakfast. As soon as I get up every morning, I’m automatically starving. My first thought is always: what do I have to eat, and how long before I can start eating it? I get started on breakfast before I take a shower, before I brush my teeth. I’m just always really, really hungry. If I go to the diner, I have to get ready first, which means that my hunger is going to mount and get stronger and tug at the corners of my consciousness. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but if I let my hunger get past a certain point, it wins. It says to me, fine, you want to be hungry? You’re going to be hungry. And after I get past that point, there’s nothing I can do that will satisfy it for the whole day. I’ll keep eating, but I’ll still be hungry. Once every couple of years or so I’ll find myself either waiting in a waiting room or being stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere for like eight hours. It might not be exactly that situation, but it’ll be some sort of scenario where I’m starving and there is absolutely no way that I’ll be able to put any food in my mouth for an extended period of time. In this case, my hunger wins, but it doesn’t stop. It metastasizes into something cruel, something vicious, something that, when I finally do get myself in front of a plate of food, won’t even let me enjoy it. Do you know what I’m talking about? How sometimes you get so hungry that when you finally get to eat it actually hurts? It doesn’t feel good or satisfying at all. It’s like your stomach has started to feast on it’s own lining, and it’s all you can do to put something, anything back in there to stop your whole digestive system from self-destructing. And each bite you take you wish you could take out, but you know that you just have to pay your dues and take your lumps and try to remember to always keep a bag of something or a piece of bread or fruit in your pockets at all times, especially when you think you might be somewhere without access to a snack for a while.

It’s obviously not that extreme, getting ready to go to breakfast at the diner, it’s only like maybe an extra half hour to an hour, getting ready, getting out of the house, walking to the diner, waiting to get seated, waiting for the waitress to come over, waiting for the food to come out. But the same process that eventually ends in me not being able to enjoy my food begins somewhere in that time span. So even though I love the diner, and I love a diner breakfast, I’m not really sure how I feel about going to the diner for breakfast.

And then there’s the issue of coffee. I get up in the morning and I love to drink coffee. I make a giant pot and just sit there and drink it and eat my breakfast. Going to the diner, it’s like the coffee is this whole separate hit-or-miss process. On a best-case scenario, I’ll sit down at the table, and a busboy will come up to me right away, even before the waitress has a chance to say hi, and he’ll say, “Coffee?” nothing else, not “hello,” not, “Would you like some …” just “Coffee?” And I’ll just say, “Yes, please, thank you so much, coffee.” And he brings me over a cup of coffee. I can’t be alone in this. Maybe people like me have this look that people who work at diners have learned to recognize as an expression of anguish that can only be satisfied by the immediate serving of coffee. And diner coffee is the best. If I could choose one type of coffee to drink for the rest of my life, it would definitely be diner coffee. It’s always so fresh because they’re constantly serving pots and pots of it. It’s just the best.

But they bring it out in these tiny cups. It has to be a huge joke. I wish they just had a coffee machine installed at every table. Barring that, I wish they’d serve the coffee in a giant cup, a cup big enough to hold five or six cups of coffee. As soon as I’m served my first cup of coffee, I like to down it in one gulp, before the busboy even has a chance to walk away, and I want him to see this. I want him to see me pour this scalding cup of hot coffee down my throat, and I want him to know that it physically pains me to do this, but he’ll get it, he’ll get the message, that I really wanted that coffee, despite the pain, despite the burning, so go get the pot, fill me up, and keep it coming.

But that’s, like I said, a best-case scenario. A slightly less best-case scenario involves the waitress having to come over, asking me if I’m ready, and I say that I am, and I have to order my cup of coffee in the same sentence that I order my large glass of orange juice and my Greek omelet (I’m being hypothetical here. I never order the same thing for breakfast. A Greek omelet just happened to be the first thing that popped in my head. But I’m not being hypothetical about the OJ. That’s always the same. Well, maybe I’m being half-hypothetical, because every once in a while I’ll get a large half-OJ half-grapefruit juice. But that’s only if I get my coffee first, because I don’t want to overload the waitress with commands that might hinder the timely delivery of my coffee.) When everything’s ordered all together, it really deemphasizes how badly I’d like the coffee to come out first, to come out right this second, can you just send over the busboy maybe? Coffee?

Amidst all of these less-than-best-case scenarios, one time I had an cup of coffee at the diner on a busy Sunday morning, and I had moved the empty cup right to the edge of the table so anybody working in the restaurant could see that I needed some more. But my waitress wasn’t around. Finally another waitress came to the booth in front of me with the pot and started pouring, and I let out a sigh of relief, but I shouldn’t have let myself get too comfortable or too relaxed, because as I closed my eyes to let out that sigh of relief, she disappeared. So now I had to wait for my waitress to show up, and I had to kind of wave her down, which I never do, because I’m a waiter myself, and I really hate it when people flag me down, or worse, snap at me, or scream out, “Hello!” to get my attention, because can’t you see that I’m really busy? I’ll get to you in just a second! But I got her attention really quick and asked for just a little more coffee, please, I’m sorry to have flagged you down, I see that you’re really busy. And she says OK and disappears. And right as she fades out of my peripheral vision, I see the busboy from across the room, and he points to me and mouths the word, “Coffee?” and I’m thinking, oh shit, what do I say? If I say yes, then there’s definitely going to be a weird awkward moment where the waitress who I totally inappropriately begged to stop what she was doing to get me some more coffee will run into the busboy with another coffee pot, both of them clearly wasting their time on the same customer for just a cup of coffee in what’s obviously a very busy diner. She’ll think that I asked her for coffee, but then got so impatient that I also asked a busboy.

But, there’s no way that I could tell the busboy no because, and I know this from working at a restaurant, the minute I say no more, then I’m totally off of his coffee radar for the rest of the meal. He’ll think to himself, that guy’s done with coffee. He said no more coffee. And then I’ll have to constantly be waving down my waitress for the rest of the meal. They’ll hate me. So the busboy is waiting for me to answer, so I just kind of make this pained expression of my face and nod, “Yes, coffee.” And he goes to get the pot, and he gets it, but as he’s making his way back over here, just like I predicted, my waitress comes out of nowhere and fills my cup. And it’s super awkward.

I take a sip and the busboy appears again, not to be outdone by the waitress, and fills me up, even if it’s just a sip’s worth of coffee. I guess it wasn’t all that bad. I try to explain myself to the waitress but she’s as uninterested as humanly possible and not only that, she’s visibly annoyed. She drops off the check and it says, handwritten, “Please pay at the register!” and I’m thinking that this has to be a personal message, because every time I come in I always just leave it at the table, because that’s how we always did it at the diner by where I grew up, and it was never a big deal. And at the restaurant I work at now, there is no register, not for customers anyway, it’s just for the staff, so we just always just take the check and the money, you always pay the waiter there, and I always get so annoyed when a customer stands up with the check and looks for somewhere to pay that doesn’t exist, but now here I am, my cup of coffee, my check before I had a chance to ask for it, and I feel just as stupid, just as stupid as I imagine my customers to be when I’m looking at them wishing they would all just sit down and stop waving and wait for me to have a second and I’ll get to them next.